Questing Marilyn: In Search of My Holy Grail, Personal Growth Through Travel

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

In the spring of 1986, the author, a marriage and family therapist,
joined a tour of Britain ostensibly to explore ancient energy sites and
old myths, but privately to take her own spiritual journey. Overloaded
with two large suitcases, notebooks, and a Dictaphone, she recorded what
sometimes seems like every meal, every private thought, every chuckle
and tear along the way.

As the tour wends its way through such English spiritual centres as
Stonehenge and Glastonbury, and Irish sites that include the 6th-century
ruins of Glendalough and Bellinter House, a nunnery used as a conference
centre, Belleghem details her struggles with her strict Catholic
upbringing, her self-confessed “rigid thinking,” and her resistance
to group activities. In Ireland she finally rents her own car and after
the World Heritage site of Newgrange, she leaves the group.

Belleghem gives brief historical descriptions of each site but the
emphasis is on the quester for whom the tour is an ordeal in many ways.
She takes her spiritual enlightenment where she can, but the weather is
often cold and wet, the group van is small and uncomfortable, washroom
breaks are a constant source of friction, doubling up in small rooms
with a stranger proves difficult, and there are constant problems with
the woman who leads the tour with what Marilyn considers bossy
incompetence and conducts its necessary rituals as if she were a priest.
Anyone who has been on a guided tour will find much to empathize with.

The book, which includes small snapshots and a map, could have used an
editor. It lacks selection and initially the constant self-analysis of
someone who is also a therapist can become wearisome. Slowly, however,
Belleghem draws us in to her personal odyssey by her sincerity and even
the wisdom she has to offer. Back home in Ontario, after admitting she
began her quest looking for “magic and mystery” only to find her
answers within herself, she leaves us with the observation that questing
is a “solitary business.” More solitary, it transpires, than she
thought when she set out.